Optical communication technology has made great progress in recent years. In the past, optical fiber communication technology and optical fiber communication elements mainly were used on backbone networks. These days they are widely used in metropolitan optical communication networks. The vision of Fiber-To-The-Home (FTTH) is achievable in the near future.
The optical fiber coupler, also called optical fiber splitter, is an essential element to implement FTTH. The optical fiber coupler usually is fabricated through a fused biconical tapered fiber coupling technique. The optical fiber passive device thus made costs less and has excellent optical characteristics. It is suitable for mass production. Hence it is widely used in the industry. In the earlier days, the technology mainly focuses on 1×2 optical fiber coupler. With the rapid advance of optical communication technology, now 1×4 optical fiber couplers have gradually become the mainstream. Hence to provide a new and desired apparatus and method to manufacture optical fiber couplers, such as a clamping device, a packaging device and the like is important.
Moreover, fabrication of the optical fiber couplers at present mostly is semi-automatic. In general, the manufacturing process of the optical fiber couplers includes at least two main stages: one is stretching optical fibers, another is packaging the stretched optical fibers. As a clamping device, the optical fiber fusion splice device and packaging device have to be moved during fabrication. Conveying mechanisms are needed to do transportation. In conventional techniques, individual device such as a clamping device, optical fiber fusion splice device, packaging device and the like are moved by individual and independent conveying mechanisms. This is more expensive and the equipment cannot be made as compact as desired.